the rest is not allocated and can be used to create logical volumes for our virtual machines

Click to expand...

So, is it essentially that Image-based approach utilizes a filesystem image (which is the guest OS root filesystem), and that image resides on a filesystem (in this case, the host OS root filesystem)... thus "layering" the Xen machine, in a sense?

And then, the LVM-based approach is a filesystem image in unallocated space, thus taking away another "layer", which makes it faster, and eliminates the need for an actual ("real/non-virtual") partition in the unallocated space?

I'm just trying to understand this a little bit better, and so far, the above is how I make sense of it, but I don't know if that is a valid analogy or not.